NASA Wants To Send Robot To Moon

Money is tight in the federal government, so the Obama administration nixed a proposed $150 billion manned NASA flight back to the Moon. The backup plan: A robot who’s willing to make the trip for $450 million.

The New York Times reports the robo-Neil Armstrong mission will send a C-3PO looking humanoid Skynet Terminator to the Moon, where it might just begin planning to build more of its kind and plan an invasion of our planet.

Dubbed Project M, the initiative has cost $9 million so far. The original hopes were to get robotic feet on the Moon by 2012, but the date is now up in the air, as plan hasn’t yet been given the green light.

Does the robot idea sound cool to you? What would you like NASA’s next big exploration mission to be?

I was talking to someone who works on robots and space stuff and he was saying that the space industry (?) is paranoid about making things automated (like using robots) because they want extreme control over working on things in space, e.g. satellites. Which is all to say, things like this don’t seem to happen too often although they could.

Bush cancelled the space shuttle, so please kindly get that straight. I am very very upset that he nixed the moon missions though. Considering only 17 people have ever been up there, we kind of need to send more!

The space shuttles were crap anyways. Too expensive for what they were used for, and never met expectations.

Project Constellation, the Orion Spacecraft, Ares I and V are our best bet. Yet much of that was cancelled by Ol’ Barry…. despite his claims to want to land on an Asteroid soon… WELL? HOW ARE WE GONNA LAND ON IT WHEN THE TECHNOLOGY NEEDED IS CANCELLED?!

LOL, I’ll have to remember that next time ;) I haven’t watched that much anime in a long time, but I still watch Gurren Lagann. It pumps me up about life every time!

“The tomorrow we’re trying to grab for ourselves is not the tomorrow you set up for us, its the tomorrow that we chose for ourselves, a tomorrow that we chose out of all the infinite universes, we’ll fight our way through and protect the universe, we’ll stop the spiral nemisis too!”

One man’s pork is another man’s space program. We cant ‘cut pork’ everywhere AND cut taxes like the teabaggers and repubicans keep ramming down our throats. Everyone wants good schools, protection, soc security and space shuttles, but no one wants to pay for it.

I think we could go a long way to cut the pork no one hears about – how much money do you think these guys simply pocket for themselves, their friends, and their relatives?

Term limits for senators and congress-creeps! None of them should be fucking dying of old age in office. Do you really think these rich geesers can identify with what’s going on right now?
They can’t even fucking type!

If it’s not, you need to advocate for 100% tax rates, since any government capable of the level of coordination and execution necessary to fake a moon landing and then maintain the fiction for this long is far, far more effective than any other private organization around, and should have full control over our lives.

Oh come on, do you REALLY think we were capable of landing men on the moon AND bringing them back in 1969? Next you’re going to tell me that the WTC 1 and 2 were brought down by airliners and not explosives placed by the government.

I thought the whole point of cancelling the flight to the moon and scrapping the space shuttle was to avoid spending money on going to the moon, since we’ve kinda been there and done that. $450 million is a drop in the bucket compared to $150 billion and makes perfect sense.

Besides, this is one area where leaving work to the private sector may not have disastrous results. In fact, hyperbole aside – this seems like the perfect time to let the private sector do its thing. Let companies like Virgin Galactic find ways to the moon and let NASA find ways to Mars.

Seriously, I want to see a man or woman on Mars someday. Make it freakin’ happen.

Many experts believe that the most efficient way to get to Mars is from a base established on the moon (where you are nearly free of Earth’s gravitational field. If you believe those experts, having NASA go to the Moon again is a logical first step at getting to Mars.

I couldn’t figure out if this idea was a logical progression from a “let’s take baby steps” perspective or a logistics perspective. Everything I’ve seen kind of suggests the former. Admittedly, I haven’t looked that much into it…

For all the humor, this actually makes a lot of sense. Fundamentally, the bang (in terms of what we learn) for the buck of human exploration just doesn’t make a lot of sense. We’d be much better off focusing on robotic exploration, and taking the rest of the money and working on human/robot (or human/computer) interface. If the goal is, fifty years down the line, to have people living on Mars (for example), it may well be more feasible (given tech trends) to have those “people” be human consciousness in inorganic form, than actually moving flesh and blood people (with all their need for oxygen, vulnerability to cold, etc etc.

I never understood this push for Mars over the Moon. The Moon is 3 days travel away, based on ’60’s and ’70’s technology. It stands to reason that the trip could be shortened to two days. Which makes it much easier to plan for emergencies, supply drops, and any possible rescue missions. Astronauts would also be within quick radio communication of a delay not more than a minute.

Yet Mars is six months away. Making any rescue, emergency plan, or supply drops exponentially harder if not impossible. Also because of the vast distance needed to go there would have to be much more planning in possible routes to avoid any objects that may damage the craft. There is also the communication barrier of several hours for a message to go back in forth.

Mars seems like great ambition, but why not colonize our little brother first? Gives a good testing environment and is more realistic for scientific and commercial ventures.

Mars and the Moon both have their difficulties in extracting said water. But both do also contain water on them. No matter what mission, Moon or Mars, the first crews would be carting along several hundred, if not thousands, of gallons of water. Finding a place to extract water and then drilling and storing said water on either surface would take time.

To answer your question, I’ve always been fond of this quote from Babylon 5:

“No. We have to stay here and there’s a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.”
Sinclair, Infection

Sending a robot makes sense, because we live in the real world, not a sci-fi fantasy. I don’t think it’s worth an extra 149.55 billion so that an actual human being sees the moon with his own eyes. All measurements will be made with so sort of machine or instrument anyway, so why bother witha human.
If it makes you feel better, a machine on the moon may increase interest in the space program.

Even though private industry doesn’t always do well with everything (health care), this is one spot where they can probably do 10 times better then NASA. NASA just seems to waste money without any real results. 40 years after a moon landing we should have been on Mars by now.

We are not on Mars because they keep having their budget cut, which is why the moon landings stopped.

No real results? Say that next time you need an MRI or CAT scan. The next time a smoke detector warns you of fire in time to exit safely. The next time you or your family are in a fire and the firemen are able to save you because their clothes can withstand the heat and they have O2 tanks “light” enough to carry. The next time you are able to drink clean water. The next time you need laser eye surgery to see clearly. That is just a very small percentage of the “results” NASA has had that contribute to your everyday life. Do you really think private business would share this technology at a reasonable cost?

I would rather see them develop and implement a cheap single-use rocket system for putting payloads into space or people/cargo to the ISS. Something cheap and very reliable. And something not reusable.